Minecraft developer makes more than £50 million

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With more than 25 million registered users and 5,366,849 full games sold, it comes as no surprise that Minecraft has notched up over £50 million in 15 months since its launch in October 2010.

Developer Mojang has reported revenue of 540 million Swedish Krona ($80 million) in that time, with earnings before interest, taxation, depreciation and amortisation of almost £8.5 million. Compare these sums to Rovio's reported $100 million revenues for 2011, and you can safely say that Minecraft is almost as big as Angry Birds.

Creator Markus "Notch" Persson, who received the Special Award at the recent BAFTA Video Games Awards 2012, has moved his earnings into a separate company. However, he has shared his $3.7 million (£2.3 million) dividend among the 25 Mojang employees.

Regardless of its success, Mojang will continue to be run in similar fashion. Persson and the rest of the company have already turned down ex-Facebook president and Napster co-founder Sean Parker as an investor, even though he flew them on his private jet to London for a night of partying.

However, it won't be averse to interesting merchandising ideas. As well as signing a deal with Lego, the company may even license a TV show in the future. As reported in the Financial Times, Carl Manneh, Mojang’s chief executive, revealed that the developer was open to negotiation.

"We’ve been approached by a number of high-profile Hollywood producers and asked to do TV shows," he said.

"We may do that. It’s hard when you don’t have any experience and someone comes to throw these ideas around. We have so much to focus on with just the game development and growing the business. But if the right idea comes along and the right people that we’d want to work with, we’d say why not?"

The latest version of Minecraft will be the Xbox 360 edition to hit Xbox Live on 9 May.